How I Breeze Through Cover Letters and Focus on My Writing

"I used to sweat cover letters."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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How do you feel when you stumble across that cover letter field in a submission form?

I used to sweat cover letters. Who do I address? What if I get the name wrong? Last or full name? Not everyone’s a Mr. How much do I say about their work, my work, myself? Is this a letter-letter with a full address or does email suffice? What did I say last time?

It’s a waste of time and creative energy.

As people with words to share, we should sweat the details—of our poems, our essays, and our stories—not our cover letters.

Here’s how I found my way to a better relationship to these often-necessary letters.

Part 1 — obscure Submittable feature

Years ago, I worked as a designer at Submittable. The complexity runs deep, especially on the editor side of things. Useful features get buried. So, it was my great joy as a writer to discover that there was a magical textbox in my personal settings. Whatever I wrote in that box would be used as part of nearly every submission on Submittable! Guess what most people used it for? Cover letters… though it wasn’t labeled that at the time.

Note what I put in the field in the following screenshot…

Submittable fields with a Cover Letter Template

This text box became my first cover letter template:

Dear FICTION EDITOR,

Please consider my WORD COUNT-word short story, "STORY TITLE," for JOURNAL OR CONTEST NAME. This is a simultaneous submission. I will withdraw it if it is accepted elsewhere.

WHY THIS STORY TO THIS JOURNAL OR CONTEST?

My brief, third-person bio:

[ bio omitted for brevity ]

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Arthur Klepchukov

This feature let me focus on the basics and know if I replaced the ALL CAPS in the template, my cover letter would be okay without repeating my bio or misspelling my name or forgetting to mention something like simultaneous submissions.

But this didn’t help at all with submissions outside of Submittable.

Then, at some point, Submittable retired this feature, as confirmed by their help documentation today: “Some legacy accounts still request a cover letter, but adding one here will not automatically populate it in submission forms. You will still need to enter it into the submission fields manually.”

I have no idea why they yanked a useful feature, but retyping even a brief letter felt silly. Instead, I made a Word doc template for myself.

Part 2 — a Word template

When I taught others how to submit at conferences and book festivals, I shared the following Word doc to help those getting started.

cover letter template as Word doc

The Word doc was a handy replacement for Submittable’s feature. But it still had limitations.

· I could open my template file and make changes for a particular submission (e.g. the name of the editor or my piece), but I had to remember to not save them or I’d overwrite the template.

· I could still accidentally delete too much of the text that shouldn’t change.

Part 3 — Cover Letter Writer

I recently made The Rejection Whisperer for helping submitters cope with verbose rejections. I thought it might be fun to make a similar website with a single purpose—writing cover letters. Let’s reserve Word for manuscripts.

Cover letters to different journals still seemed to have more in common than not. Address the correct editor, mention the title of your work and its length, and add a brief bio. Just the essentials.

How could I improve things?

In prose, rounding word counts to the nearest hundred words (a sign of professionalism) also felt like something technology could do for me. In the following image, compare my input on the left with the output on the right.

I dropped the name of the place I’m submitting to. The editor knows which journal they edit. Every extra field adds complexity and an opportunity for an embarrassing typo.

The simultaneous sentence was a reminder to mention whether my submission was simultaneous or exclusive. How I mentioned that didn’t matter as much as if I decided yes or no for simultaneous. Sounds like a checkbox.

And my favorite bios are simple and short. A sentence about writing. If you’re new, embrace being an emerging writer. If you’re established, brag about 3 publications but no more.

Once all that was in place, the Cover Letter Writer was officially ready for the world.

Cover Letter Writer template

It’s a free web site, available to anyone. It has helped me write dozens of polite cover letters faster by focusing on what changes—the editor’s name, the story title and word count. I don’t have to stress the rest.

Takeaways

Not all of us craft our own tools to help our writing or submission process, but we can all observe patterns. That’s all I did along the way. What do you do that feels repetitive? What feels like it takes too long? What would help you get back to the writing you want to do?

I found my way to the Submittable template by browsing around their help docs, trying to see how else an existing tool can help me. Seek what you need; it may already exist.

I don’t know of many other writers who also design and create products, outside of the team at Chill Subs. Submittable has grown to a much larger team with interests far beyond writing. If you happen to be at the intersection of writing and technology or know someone who is, I’d love to meet!

I encourage you to revisit your tools—and ask for or craft new ones.

Along with The Rejection Whisperer, this is part of a larger project called Words Beyond Me that uses sprinkles of technology to make quality submissions faster and build persistence. Let me know if the Cover Letter Writer helps you with your next submission. I hope it does.

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